Femi Kuti 252 <a href="http://www.myspace.com/femikuti">Femi Kuti</a> cannot resist. He is chatting in his dressing room about improvements needed to African infrastructure and, in the midst of describing his awe at America’s highway system, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer can’t contain his bubbling over in boyish imitation of the sounds of combustion power. “You have to be envious of the highways in America,” Femi says. “Ooh! Four lanes! Six lanes! Coming and going! Rrnrrmnrrr rrrrrngh ahhhh oooh! If we had this in Africa, who would crave to come to America?” Forget that in this 21st century Americans are beside themselves figuring how to be rid of economic, environmental, military catastrophes brought, in part, by overdependence on automotive luxury. Femi is now in the throat a <a href="http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=bandprofile.listAllShows&friendid=141025801&n=Femi+Kuti">continental road trip</a> through 26 <a href="http://spinearth.tv/region/north-america">North American</a> cities -- plus more than a dozen in <a href="http://spinearth.tv/region/europe">Europe</a> -- between the first week in June and the first week in August. His excitement betrays, as much as his desire for transit equality, for leveling global imbalance, that spirit of being carried away, of losing oneself in the throes, that animated ecstasy, so central to Afrobeat’s movement. ** Onstage, Olufemi Anikulapo Kuti’s rush gets channeled into a frenzy of precise (if sometimes improvised) details. He hops from microphone to microphone, instrument to instrument; now saxophone, now keyboard, stationed now at the back among the brass section, ceding the floor to a guitarist; now in front slicing his open palm in directed punctuations as the bandleader he is, after the grand examples of Count Basie and Benny Goodman all the way through to his father, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fela_Kuti">Afrobeat founder and agitator folk-hero Fela Kuti</a>. “Ah la la la!” Femi calls. He raises up arm to catch the crowd’s delirious response: “A-la-la <i>la LAH</i>!” Femi’s trade is this liveliness, of course. But as I spoke with him 20 June, backstage at <a href="http://spinearth.tv/home/search?query=fillmore">the Fillmore</a> in <a href="http://spinearth.tv/city/san-francisco">San Francisco</a> -- without any ringing horns or highlife guitar running along like telephone wires, without any painted dancers swirling their arms and shaking their, mm, sashes -- his enthusiasm moves more subtly. Like a train beginning to stir, or the weather. He’s rolling forth in a rendition, for example, of his troubles early last month when <a href="http://spinearth.tv/city/lagos">Lagos</a> police closed down his dance club there, <a href="http://shrinetv.com">The New Afrika Shrine</a>. <a href="http://spinearth.tv/report/foolish-as-ever-nigerian-authorities-again-shutter-kutis-shrine">For a little more than a week authorities shuttered the venue, a revival of his father’s legendary establishment, for the putative reasons of too much noise and illegal street commerce.</a> According to Femi, the Shrine management can’t be responsible for children selling wares on the government-owned streets. Femi tells the history of the place in his father’s time, “A holy place, yes a place of worship … when he died we tried to buy that land off them. They refused … now we managed to get another land. Now it’s a social gathering. We intend to have a library there.” Laying head back against the brown leather sofa, Femi tosses open his fingers across his knee to the beat of his words. He explains his belief that Nigeria’s government singles him out to discourage any memory of Fela Kuti’s struggles against political graft, censorship and other corruptions -- when Femi comes suddenly unleashed again, his voice rises and carries him away: “They find a reason to shut the place which has nothing to do with us! The churches make a lot of noise in Nigeria!” he says. “The mosque wake you up at four in the morning -- in residential areas! Now the shrine is not in a residential area!” ** When the Shrine was closed, its website put up a defiant announcement, “The New Afrika Shrine, Nigeria’s last bastion of Liberty, has been closed by the authorities. Say NO to the shutdown of the New Afrika Shrine!” with a link to sign an <a href="http://www.petitiononline.com/shrine09/">online petition</a> asking the Governor of Lagos and Nigerian Ministry of Justice to reopen the shrine and end all harassment. Some news outlets reported the closure, though few in the Nigerian press did, but most of the work got done by blogs, including <a href="http://spinearth.tv/report/foolish-as-ever-nigerian-authorities-again-shutter-kutis-shrine">SPIN Earth</a> and other African music, art or political web sites, and by chains of emails urging action. By 12 June, the Shrine was allowed to reopen. “You see what’s going on in <a href="http://spinearth.tv/home/search?query=iran">Iran</a> today,” Femi says. “You see what’s going on worldwide, with the internet. The speed at which information is passed is so rapid that it’s totally out of control of the authorities to stop any information from getting round the world today.” What interests me about Femi’s thought is the way he is impressed not merely with the internet’s rapid flow of information. To him it’s more than that; it becomes a tool for escaping the domain of government restriction on speech, an anarchy of speech where antiestablishment voices can live free and find any audience. Not surprising, given the adversarial manners authorities have shown him and his family, Femi Kuti is the most outspoken public figure against government I have ever met. Even many radically experimental artists, or artists who are radical politically outside their creative projects, are less likely to talk freely on or off record about ideas so expressly insurgent. “I don’t like any corrupt government,” Femi says. “And any government that doesn’t do what it is supposed to do cannot be my friend.” Although he most often specifies his criticisms this way, toward “corrupt” regimes, Femi, who studies closely <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey">Marcus Garvey</a>, told me he hopes freedom of communication brought by channels like the worldwide web can lead to a time when government altogether is not necessary, when people can get along as free individuals. In this he is with his father Fela, who asked for a society organized by its people -- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuWV8ellRM8">"no Marxism, no capitalism; Africanism.”</a> <i>Continued in <a href="http://www.spinearth.tv/report/in-afrobeat-fight-femi-kuti-is-no-friend-of-government-pt-2">part 2</a></i> 19 2009-07-06T20:28:37Z 2 1 Cultural/Heritage 2013 6.44116 3.41798 Lagos, Nigeria 2009-07-09T13:32:00Z 6 in-afrobeat-fight-femi-kuti-is-no-friend-of-government published femifemi, bestoweek12, Femi Kuti, fillmore, fela, highlife, nigeria, shrine, iran 2009-07-10T23:58:33Z The Fillmore 2027